Child, you are like a flower,
So sweet and pure and fair.
I look at you, and sadness
Touches me with a prayer.

The speaker addresses a child with the conventional Romantic simile of the flower—an emblem of innocence, delicacy, and transient beauty. The turn comes with the admission that looking at the child brings “sadness” and a “prayer”: admiration is inseparable from foreboding, as if the child’s purity is threatened by time, suffering, or the world’s corruption. The prayer suggests both tenderness and helplessness—an impulse to protect what cannot ultimately be protected. In Heine’s characteristic mode, sweetness is edged with melancholy: the lyric voice blesses innocence while simultaneously mourning its fragility.